Nile Gardiner is a Washington-based foreign affairs analyst and political commentator. A former aide to Margaret Thatcher, Gardiner has served as a foreign policy adviser to two US presidential campaigns. He appears frequently on American and British television, including Fox News Channel, BBC, and Fox Business Network.

Cristina Kirchner continues to lie about the Falklands

Argentina’s president Cristina Kirchner comes across as an increasingly sad and delusional figure. While Argentina’s economy heads towards the economic abyss, facing likely censure by the IMF, she continues to swan around the world stage as though she were a modern-day Evita. This week she has been doing the rounds at the United Nations, where her speech to the General Assembly on Tuesday afternoon was barely noticed, while her glitzy Manhattan hotel was besieged by protesters angry with her economic policies. On Wednesday morning she spoke to a relatively small crowd at Georgetown University, and today she heads to Harvard, where a few left-wing academics might sympathise with her outdated populist-socialist message.

Eager to turn attention away from her own government’s dismal economic record, mounting suppression of the media at home, and growing unpopularity, Kirchner has resorted once again to bashing Britain over the Falklands. At the UN she called for the umpteenth time for Buenos Aires and London to negotiate the sovereignty of the Falkland Islands. According to the official summary of her speech provided by the Argentine government (they have not released a full transcript of her address):

On international territorial disputes, she said 2013 would mark the 180th year of the United Kingdom’s illegal usurpation of the Malvinas (Falkland Islands). Many resolutions issued of the General Assembly’s Fourth Committee (Special Political and Decolonization) and other entities had all asked the United Kingdom to sit down with Argentina for dialogue, but it had refused.

She called for the demilitarization of the South Atlantic, pointing out that the international community did not represent multilateralism when permanent members of the Security Council had the right to flout resolutions. The dispute was not a bilateral matter, but a global issue that presented a chance to end colonialism.

Mrs. Kirchner of course fails to mention the fact that the Falklands are a self-governing British Overseas Territory, with its own government, or that Argentina invaded the Falklands in 1982 before its forces were emphatically defeated and the Islands liberated by British troops. The only country with an interest in “colonising” the Falklands is Argentina itself.

A recent census of Falkland Islanders published in early September revealed that 59 percent of the Islands’ 2,841 inhabitants consider their national identity to be ‘Falkland Islander’, 29 percent consider themselves British, 9.8 percent St. Helenian, and 5.4 percent Chilean (including some Islanders who consider themselves to be Falkland Islanders as well as Chilean or St. Helenian). Barely any considered themselves to be Argentinian.

Many inhabitants of the Falklands have deep roots in the Islands. As Jan Cheek, Member of the Legislative Assembly told The Daily Telegraph:

The census shows that there is a real national identity here. My grandchildren are the eighth generation of my family to have lived here, which is considerably longer than the Argentine president’s family have been living in Argentina.”

The notion that the inhabitants of the Falklands wish to live under the heel of Argentina is simply ridiculous, and is a pure fantasy advanced by the Kirchner regime. This is a clear-cut case of self-determination, and the Falklands will be holding its own referendum in March 2013 to decide whether it wishes to remain a British Overseas Territory. Cristina Kirchner should respect the results of the Falklands referendum and forever hold her peace on the matter. In the meantime she should drop her reckless threats to blockade the Islands and end her embarrassing campaign for UN-brokered negotiations, which will never happen.

The future of the Falklands is not a ‘global’ issue to be decided by an outdated and irrelevant UN Decolonisation Committee. It is a matter for the Falkland Islanders themselves to decide, and as long as they wish to remain under British protection, London must defend their right to live in liberty and freedom without fear of invasion from Argentina.